MDMD(4) p.123 small re-write

[David Casseres]

Vaska sez
>...is there someone on the list who knows a great deal more about
>[chaos theory than either I or Tom Stoppard, that's the question.  Because
>it would be nice to have some intelligible light thrown on this topic
>[intelligible to lay people like myself, that is], especially now that
>we're reading _M&D_ where "science" seems to come under so much criticism.  

Well, I don't know about "a great deal more," but I am moderately 
mathematical and have read James Gleick's excellent, highly readable 
popular book on the subject

Chaos theory is very interested in a couple of ideas that are also 
important literary ideas.  One is "self-similarity," the observation that 
if you look at the shape of a coastline (for example) on a world map, 
that shape is very much "like" the shape of a small section of the same 
coastline seen close-up.  Of course they may be differently shaped but 
the point is if you saw both shapes drawn as wiggly lines without any 
labels, you couldn't tell which was which.  And self-similarity is found 
over and over again in nature, and in the lives of people.  And so, just 
as philosophers and artists have found great productive power in the 
notion of microcosms within the macrocosm, mathematicians have done a 
great deal with fractals, which are shapes (and other mathematical 
objects) that exhibit self-similarity.  The "Mandelbrot set," thanks to 
the power of computer graphics, is the most familiar example of a fractal.

The other idea is "non-linearity," which is the phenomenon of huge 
effects that are out of all proportion to their tiny causes.  The classic 
image is that a butterfly flaps its wings in Manchuria, and this is 
ultimately the cause of a blizzard in North America.  And of course life 
and literature are chock-full of this; it makes great stories.  This is 
the chaos in "chaos theory"; if you look at the tiny-cause end of the 
story, trying to predict the effect, you see only a chaos of a zillion 
possible effects of all sizes, while if you look back from the 
huge-effect end and try to deduce the cause, you see only a chaos of 
zillions of possible causes.  Literature tries to tell a story that 
relates the cause and the effect to each other and to all the other 
events that lie between and around them, and chaos theory tries to 
provide techniques for characterizing whatever mechanisms and 
relationships can be found in the chaos.

Fractals turn out to be important in this effort, because often 
self-similarity is the bridge between the tiny and the huge.  Perhaps in 
some sense self-similarity is the most fundamental of "patterns" that can 
be used to apprehend what is otherwise too complex.  "As above, so 
below," sez the philosopher, and that can be a great comfort to the 
bewildered, or a means for an artist to find and express a truth, or a 
hook on which to hang an entire cosmology, or a key to an analysis of 
something like carcinogenesis.

Both literature and chaos theory are trying, of course, to rescue 
comprehensibility from the chaos of complex reality, by finding some kind 
of order *within* the chaos.  This is in contrast to the eternal project 
of Them, which is "to bring order out of chaos," the operative word being 
"out."  Pull the order out of the chaos, and let the chaos fall away, we 
don't like it.  Imposing order upon chaos is really the same thing, the 
important point being to treat order and chaos as antitheses.  A-&, of 
course the project of mere anarchy is to reduce order to chaos, again 
treating them as antitheses.

But look out.  Chaos theory is destined to surpass Special Relativity and 
even Quantum Uncertainty as the most misapprehended and badly-used 
scientific metaphor of our century, precisely because it *is* closely and 
visibly connected to our everyday experience of Real (tm) Life.  Already, 
math-literate wags make jokes like "Oh, he's been completely non-linear 
ever since he read The Crying of Lot 49," and it won't be long before 
earnest cocktail-party conversations start going on about the fractal 
character of somebody's economic policy.  My previous paragraph walks the 
crumbling edge of ... oh, but that's self-reference, isn't it....



Cheers,
David